Styron's short novel, The Long March, has the distinction of being one of the few novels registering the actual impact on the American mind of the Korean war. In the course of this war a hysteria was whipped up such as had not been found necessary in the Second World War. In that anti-fascist war, there had been no policy of answering fascist brutality with like brutality and inhumanity. But now, under the assurance that the struggle was against communism and communism was by its very nature the worst barbarism, every barbaric tactic was justified. Overlooked was the fact that our ally, whose government we were supposedly defending, was a notorious dictator and swindler. The Nazis, who had been condemned for ruthlessly carrying the war to civilians, were outdone by napalm bombs that incinerated fields, towns and people. In the anti-fascist war, the aim had been to train an enlightened soldier. Now a soldier had to be trained to be a single-minded killer.. ..

Styron's novelette is set in a marine training camp in the United States. The Korean war is only briefly mentioned as going on at the time. What he does picture is the new carelessness of human life and brutality in the military training. At the beginning, eight men are killed during target practice by a shell that falls short, the shell being from a shipment that was known to be probably defective. The rest of the story is of a forced march of 36 miles, which the men had not been trained for adequately, ordered by the commander, Colonel Templeton. He is a martinet, whose militarism has a "priestlike, religious fervor." A Captain Mannix, who hates both militarism and the Colonel, protests against the march but goes through with it, despite a hurt foot, determined to show that he can take any ordeal. Finally he explodes in wrath against the Colonel, and is cited to be court-martialed and sent to Korea.

Significant is Styron's description of Mannix: "The man with the back unbreakable, the soul of pity—where was he now, great unshatterable vessel of longing, lost in the night, astray at mid-century in the never-endingness of war?" Like Camus's Sisyphus, Mannix rolls the rock of militarism while scorning it, and this broadens to a symbol of Styron's hatred of war while feeling that man is eternally condemned to it.